The online resource Gallica is adding stuff all the time–it’s hard to keep up. This post is about their coverage of some of the main medieval monophonic song books.
I’m teaching medieval monophonic song to undergraduates at the moment and I always ask them to critique modern editions in the light of the complex source situation, especially for the troubadour and trouvère repertoire. They report finding Gallica quite hard to navigate, so I’ve designed this blogpost for them so that they can at least be directed to some of the troubadour and trouvère sources.
I found information and updates on Gallica’s holdings from various posts on Dominique Gatté’s social network site for medieval musicology. It’s really worth joining — despite its URL, it’s not just for chant! They send a lot of emails, but you can opt to have them aggregated into a a daily digest (recommended).
The links below are to a few of the troubadour and trouvère chansonniers with melodies (and without) that are on Gallica (those from other libraries, as well as vernacular song repertoires from other linguistic traditions, can be found via a recent blogpage on Gatté’s site). NB: The sigla are particular to troubadour OR trouvère sources; so troubadour C is not the same as trouvère C!
Chansonnier Trouvère M “du roi” (F-Pn fr. 844)
Chansonnier Trouvère N (F-Pn fr. 845)
Chansonnier Trouvère O “Cangé” (F-Pn fr. 846) (and an 18thC copy of this source in F-Pn fr. 12610)
Chansonnier Trouvère X “Clairambault” (F-Pn n. a. fr. 1050)
The ones below have poems but no melodies:
Chansonnier Troubadour C (F-Pn fr.865) [no musical notation]
Chansonnier Troubadour B (F-Pn fr.1592) [no musical notation]
Chansonnier Trouvère C (F-Pn fr.856) [no musical notation]
Chansonnier Trouvère S (F-Pn fr. 12581) [no musical notation]
Chansonnier Trouvère V (F-Pn fr. 1553) [no musical notation]
